It is an exhausting thought process and hard to balance since it is very subjective. If you think about each asset with this mindset, you can keep the “realness” of the art while layering in more stylized painterly elements. The divots and jagged edges are achieved by sculpting in ZBrush and baking a normal map with Xnormal. The diffuse textures for the rocks are almost flat grey with an ambient occlusion bake multiplied in, but the edges are highlighted (think drybrushing miniature models) to emphasize the more detailed divots and jagged edges. What makes rocks feel real, when rocks could be any color or shape? How come we all know what a rock is when we see it?įor Firewatch, we distilled “rock” to mean having smooth surfaces interrupted by jagged edges and detailed divots. Now think this way about your game world-rocks, for example. Why does it feel real though? The soft-shadow-like ambient occlusion makes it feel very grounded on the plane, in this particular case. It feels pretty real to me, even though it is literally a white sphere on a white plane. How do you artistically create and work in a style between “photorealistic” and “painterly” in 3D? people say photorealistic, I often think people actually mean “feeling like it is grounded in reality” as opposed to seeing all the micro textural surface details of real life. We rarely say, “This scene is not quite orange enough.” Instead the conversation would be, “We want this to feel striking, hot, with a slight sense of unease.” Think about how the color of pale yellow custard makes you feel compared to how the orange of glowing hot coals make you feel. So the back and forth between dev and design is more about agreeing if the scene feels right. The colors are there to communicate a mood and a tone, and if you fail to understand what the concept artist or production designer is trying to convey USING the colors, then you will never really capture the spirit of it.
Before you try to translate a concept into the game, you must ask yourself, “How does this concept make me feel?" You can’t just say, "Oh it’s orange, I’ll eyedropper the colors and if I accurately transcribe the RGB value it will be "accurate.” No. I don’t use an eyedropper tool or anything. He did say he particularly enjoys experimenting with the tone and color curves in Photoshop.Īs for how we translate what is in Olly’s concept to the game, it is-forgive me if it sounds corny-really just a matter of capturing how it feels. “We just turn the knobs until it looks good” is the usual joke, but it is not that far from the truth. As for how he came up with the specific color palettes, I asked, and Olly mostly just points to his 10-year experience in graphic design. Olly was in fact inspired by those posters and the resulting art direction is definitely intentional. just recently, Kelsey Sidwell published a really thoughtful article over at Kill Screen about how the bold clean colors of Firewatch resemble the old National Park Service posters from the New Deal era. How do you come up with the color palette? Surely there is back-and-forth from dev to design to dev on the coloring. I asked Twitter if anyone had questions about the art or art process of Firewatch and we got quite a few!
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